A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays
Willa Sibert Cather
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Willa Cather
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Title: A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays
Author: Willa Cather
Release Date: May 24, 2008 [EBook #25586]
Last updated: January 31, 2009
Language: English
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START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A COLLECTION OF STORIES ***
Produced by Suzanne Shell, Barbara Tozier and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
A Collection of
Stories, Reviews and Essays
by
Willa Cather
CONTENTS
PART
I:
STORIES
Peter On the Divide Eric Hermannson’s Soul The Sentimentality of William Tavener The Namesake The Enchanted Bluff The Joy of Nelly Deane The Bohemian Girl Consequences The Bookkeeper’s Wife Ardessa Her Boss
PART
II:
REVIEWS
AND
ESSAYS
Mark Twain William Dean Howells Edgar Allan Poe Walt Whitman Henry James Harold Frederic Kate Chopin Stephen Crane Frank Norris When I Knew Stephen Crane On the Art of Fiction
PART I
STORIES
Peter
“No, Antone, I have told thee many times, no, thou shalt not sell it
until I am gone.”
“But I need money; what good is that old fiddle to thee? The very
crows laugh at thee when thou art trying to play. Thy hand trembles
so thou canst scarce hold the bow. Thou shalt go with me to the Blue
to cut wood to-morrow. See to it thou art up early.”
“What, on the Sabbath, Antone, when it is so cold? I get so very
cold, my son, let us not go to-morrow.”
“Yes, to-morrow, thou lazy old man. Do not I cut wood upon the
Sabbath? Care I how cold it is? Wood thou shalt cut, and haul it
too, and as for the fiddle, I tell thee I will sell it yet.” Antone
pulled his ragged cap down over his low heavy brow, and went out.
The old man drew his stool up nearer the fire, and sat stroking his
violin with trembling fingers and muttering, “Not while I live, not
while I live.”
Five years ago they had come here, Peter Sadelack, and his wife, and
oldest son Antone, and countless smaller Sadelacks, here to the
dreariest part of south-western Nebraska, and had taken up a
homestead. Antone was the acknowledged master of the premises, and
people said he was a likely youth, and would do well. That he was
mean and untrustworthy every one knew, but that made little
difference. His corn was better tended than any in the county, and
his wheat always yielded more than other men’s.
Of Peter no one knew much, nor had any one a good word to say for
him. He drank whenever he could get out of Antone’s sight long
enough to pawn his hat or coat for whiskey. Indeed there were but
two things he would not pawn, his pipe and his violin. He was a
lazy, absent minded old fellow, who liked to fiddle better than to
plow, though Antone surely got work enough out of them all, for that
matter. In the house of which Antone was master there was no one,
from the little boy three years old, to the old man of sixty, who
did not earn his bread. Still people said that Peter was worthless,
and was a great drag on Antone, his son, who never drank, and was a
much better man than his father had ever been. Peter did not care
what people said. He did not like the country, nor the people, least
of all he liked the plowing. He was very homesick for Bohemia. Long
ago, only eight years ago by the calendar, but it seemed eight
centuries to Peter, he had been a second violinist in the great
theatre at Prague. He had gone into the theatre very young, and had
been there all his life, until he had a stroke of paralysis, which
made his arm so weak that his bowing was uncertain. Then they told
him he could go. Those were great days at the theatre. He had plenty
to drink then, and wore a dress coat every evening, and there were
always parties after the play. He could play in those days, ay, that
he could! He could never read the notes well, so he did not play
first; but his touch, he had a touch indeed, so Herr Mikilsdoff, who
led the orchestra, had said. Sometimes now Peter thought he could
plow better if he could only bow as he used to. He had seen all the
lovely women in the world there, all the great singers and the great
players. He was in the orchestra when Rachel played, and he heard
Liszt play when the Countess d’Agoult sat in the stage box and threw
the master white lilies. Once, a French woman came and played for
weeks, he did not remember her name now. He did not remember her
face very well either, for it changed so, it was never twice the
same. But the beauty of it, and the great hunger men felt at the
sight of it, that he remembered. Most of all he remembered her
voice. He did not know French, and could not understand a word she
said, but it seemed to him that she must be talking the music of
Chopin. And her voice, he thought he should know that in the other
world. The last night she played a play in which a man touched her
arm, and she stabbed him. As Peter sat among the smoking gas jets
down below the footlights with his fiddle on his knee, and looked up
at her, he thought he would like to die too, if he could touch her
arm once, and have her stab him so. Peter went home to his wife very
drunk that night. Even in those days he was a foolish fellow, who
cared for nothing but music and pretty faces.
It was all different now. He had nothing to drink and little to eat,
and here, there was nothing but sun, and grass, and sky. He had
forgotten almost everything, but some things he remembered well
enough. He loved his violin and the holy Mary, and above all else he
feared the Evil One, and his son Antone.
The fire was low, and it grew cold. Still Peter sat by the fire
remembering. He dared not throw more cobs on the fire; Antone would
be angry. He did not want to cut wood tomorrow, it would be Sunday,
and he wanted to go to mass. Antone might let him do that. He held
his violin under his wrinkled chin, his white hair fell over it, and
he began to play “Ave Maria.” His hand shook more than ever before,
and at last refused to work the bow at all. He sat stupefied for a
while, then arose, and taking his violin with him, stole out into
the old sod stable. He took Antone’s shot-gun down
from its peg, and
loaded it by the moonlight which streamed in through the door. He
sat down on the dirt floor, and leaned back against the dirt wall.
He heard the wolves howling in the distance, and the night wind
screaming as it swept over the snow. Near him he heard the regular
breathing of the horses in the dark. He put his crucifix above his
heart, and folding his hands said brokenly all the Latin he had ever
known, ”Pater noster, qui in caelum est.“ Then he raised his head
and sighed, “Not one kreutzer will Antone pay them to pray for my
soul, not one kreutzer, he is so careful of his money, is Antone, he
does not waste it in drink, he is a better man than I, but hard
sometimes. He works the girls too hard, women were not made to work
so. But he shall not sell thee, my fiddle, I can play thee no more,
but they shall not part us. We have seen it all together, and we
will forget it together, the French woman and all.” He held his
fiddle under his chin a moment, where it had lain so often, then put
it across his knee and broke it through the middle. He pulled off
his forehead, and pressed the trigger with his toe.
In the morning Antone found him stiff, frozen fast in a pool of
blood. They could not straighten him out enough to fit a coffin, so
they buried him in a pine box. Before the funeral Antone carried to
town the fiddle-bow which Peter had forgotten to break. Antone was
very thrifty, and a better man than his father had been.
The Mahogany Tree
, May 21, 1892
On the Divide
Near Rattlesnake Creek, on the side of a little draw stood Canute’s
shanty. North, east, south, stretched the level Nebraska plain of
long rust-red grass that undulated constantly in the wind. To the
west the ground was broken and rough, and a narrow strip of timber
wound along the turbid, muddy little stream that had scarcely
ambition enough to crawl over its black bottom. If it had not been
for the few stunted cottonwoods and elms that grew along its banks,
Canute would have shot himself years ago. The Norwegians are a
timber-loving people, and if there is even a turtle pond with a few
plum bushes around it they seem irresistibly drawn toward it.
As to the shanty itself, Canute had built it without aid of any
kind, for when he first squatted along the banks of Rattlesnake
Creek there was not a human being within twenty miles. It was built
of logs split in halves, the chinks stopped with mud and plaster.
The roof was covered with earth and was supported by one gigantic
beam curved in the shape of a round arch. It was almost impossible
that any tree had ever grown in that shape. The Norwegians used to
say that Canute had taken the log across his knee and bent it into
the shape he wished. There were two rooms, or rather there was one
room with a partition made of ash saplings interwoven and bound
together like big straw basket work. In one corner there was a cook
stove, rusted and broken. In the other a bed made of unplaned planks
and poles. It was fully eight feet long, and upon it was a heap of
dark bed clothing. There was a chair and a bench of colossal
proportions. There was an ordinary kitchen cupboard with a few
cracked dirty dishes in it, and beside it on a tall box a tin
wash-basin. Under the bed was a pile of pint flasks, some broken,
some whole, all empty. On the wood box lay a pair of shoes of almost
incredible dimensions. On the wall hung a saddle, a gun, and some
ragged clothing, conspicuous among which was a suit of dark cloth,
apparently new, with a paper collar carefully wrapped in a red silk
handkerchief and pinned to the sleeve. Over the door hung a wolf and
a badger skin, and on the door itself a brace of thirty or forty
snake skins whose noisy tails rattled ominously every time it
opened. The strangest things in the shanty were the wide
window-sills. At first glance they looked as though they had been
ruthlessly hacked and mutilated with a hatchet, but on closer
inspection all the notches and holes in the wood took form and
shape. There seemed to be a series of pictures. They were, in a
rough way, artistic, but the figures were heavy and labored, as
though they had been cut very slowly and with very awkward
instruments. There were men plowing with little horned imps sitting
on their shoulders and on their horses’ heads. There were men
praying with a skull hanging over their heads and little demons
behind them mocking their attitudes. There were men fighting with
big serpents, and skeletons dancing together. All about these
pictures were blooming vines and foliage such as never grew in this
world, and coiled among the branches of the vines there was always
the scaly body of a serpent, and behind every flower there was a
serpent’s head. It was a veritable Dance of Death by one who had
felt its sting. In the wood box lay some boards, and every inch of
them was cut up in the same manner. Sometimes the work was very rude
and careless, and looked as though the hand of the workman had
trembled. It would sometimes have been hard to distinguish the men
from their evil geniuses but for one fact, the men were always grave
and were either toiling or praying, while the devils were always
kindling and it was evident that the artist did not value his work
highly.
It was the first day of winter on the Divide. Canute stumbled into
his shanty carrying a basket of cobs, and after filling the stove,
sat down on a stool and crouched his seven foot frame over the fire,
staring drearily out of the window at the wide gray sky. He knew by
heart every individual clump of bunch grass in the miles of red
shaggy prairie that stretched before his cabin. He knew it in all
the deceitful loveliness of its early summer, in all the bitter
barrenness of its autumn. He had seen it smitten by all the plagues
of Egypt. He had seen it parched by drought, and sogged by rain,
beaten by hail, and swept by fire, and in the grasshopper years he
had seen it eaten as bare and clean as bones that the vultures have
left. After the great fires he had seen it stretch for miles and
miles, black and smoking as the floor of hell.
He rose slowly and crossed the room, dragging his big feet heavily
as though they were burdens to him. He looked out of the window into
the hog corral and saw the pigs burying themselves in the straw
before the shed. The leaden gray clouds were beginning to spill
themselves, and the snowflakes were settling down over the white
leprous patches of frozen earth where the hogs had gnawed even the
sod away. He shuddered and began to walk, tramping heavily with his
ungainly feet. He was the wreck of ten winters on the Divide and he
knew what they meant. Men fear the winters of the Divide as a child
fears night or as men in the North Seas fear the still dark cold of
the polar twilight.
His eyes fell upon his gun, and he took it down from the wall and
looked it over. He sat down on the edge of his bed and held the
barrel towards his face, letting his forehead rest upon it, and laid
his finger on the trigger. He was perfectly calm, there was neither
passion nor despair in his face, but the thoughtful look of a man
who is considering. Presently he laid down the gun, and reaching
into the cupboard, drew out a pint bottle of raw white alcohol.
Lifting it to his lips, he drank greedily. He washed his face in the
tin basin and combed his rough hair and shaggy blond beard. Then he
stood in uncertainty before the suit of dark clothes that hung on
the wall. For the fiftieth time he took them in his hands and tried
to summon courage to put them on. He took the paper collar that was
pinned to the sleeve of the coat and cautiously slipped it under his
rough beard, looking with timid expectancy into the cracked,
splashed glass that hung over the bench. With a short laugh he threw
it down on the bed, and pulling on his old black hat, he went out,
striking off across the level.
It was a physical necessity for him to get away from his cabin once
in a while. He had been there for ten years, digging and plowing and
sowing, and reaping what little the hail and the hot winds and the
frosts left him to reap. Insanity and suicide are very common things
on the Divide. They come on like an epidemic in the hot wind season.
Those scorching dusty winds that blow up over the bluffs from Kansas
seem to dry up the blood in men’s veins as they do the sap in the
corn leaves. Whenever the yellow scorch creeps down over the tender
inside leaves about the ear, then the coroners prepare for active
duty; for the oil of the country is burned out and it does not take
long for the flame to eat up the wick. It causes no great sensation
there when a Dane is found swinging to his own windmill tower, and
most of the Poles after they have become too careless and
discouraged to shave themselves keep their razors to cut their
throats with.
It may be that the next generation on the Divide will be very happy,
but the present one came too late in life. It is useless for men
that have cut hemlocks among the mountains of Sweden for forty years
to try to be happy in a country as flat and gray and as naked as the